Patterns for Federated Architecture

An enterprise federated architecture intends to mirror the structure of the organisation, aiming to provide better support for both new and legacy applications within a distributed environment and facilitating data exchange between applications to support information integration. Under this architectural form, the organisation’s information systems are separated out into autonomous co-operating application clusters, each connected to a message-oriented federal highway acting as the vehicle for inter-domain communication. The federated approach intends to avoid unnecessary coupling (in the distributed computing sense) by grouping highly interdependent modules and applications into domains, whilst minimising the strength of inter-domain connections. This article presents how to design a distributed federated architectural form using three architectural patterns, and shows how these three patterns are to be connected to comply with the specification of the the federated form.